The New York Times headline asked, “Is this the end of the high five?” Another timely question in the age of coronavirus.

With hand-to-hand contact identified as a primary culprit in spreading the contagion, the familiar palm-slap above the head is being seriously frowned upon. For more than 40 years, it has been a hallmark ritual of jockdom celebration, commiseration and congratulation. Yet—“out of an abundance of caution,” as the operative phrase goes—the high five act already had segued into fist bumps and elbow knocks in the days before the sports industry shut down completely. Who’s to say that, even upon a return to normal existence, it won’t be gone forever?

On the one hand (and keep washing it), old habits don’t die easily. The basic handshake, for instance, is said to have originated thousands of years ago, possibly to demonstrate that the offered shake indicated the lack of a weapon. Or was merely to suggest friendship, seal a deal or show respect.

One of the great civil traditions in sports is the hockey handshake at the conclusion of playoff series, when members of opposing teams—after having gone at each other, hammer and tongs—line up for polite individual greetings and let bygones be bygones. “That’s the kind of thing,” former Islanders goaltender Glenn Resch told me years ago, “that raises sport to being a sport. It raises us above being just animals.”

Sports being sports, though, there is plenty over-the-top exuberance, and elaborate variations of saluting colleagues’ accomplishments evolved. Pairing the ubiquitous presence of televised games with human nature’s bent toward mimicry, we arrived at the high five as everyday fashion.

The custom long ago spread far beyond the playing fields and has become something of a cliché. In 1981, “high five” was added to the Oxford Dictionary. In 2002, a group of University of Virginia students invented National High Five Day, to be celebrated on the third Thursday of April with a 24-hour period for giving as many high fives as possible to friends and strangers alike. (Might that annual rite also be in jeopardy now?)

So, if this is the end of the high five, what exactly was the beginning? Most accounts cite a 1977 baseball game in which Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke, greeting teammate Dusty Baker after the latter’s home run, spontaneously stretched an arm overhead and giddily whacked hands with Baker.

Others cite the 1978-79 University of Louisville’s basketball players as high five authors, and there also is a tale that late 1970s Murray State basketball player Lamont Sleets practiced the maneuver and attributed the name to his father’s Vietnam unit, “The Fives.”

Some claim that women’s volleyball players created the move in the 1960s, and in my half-century of working as a sports journalist, the first time I witnessed anything resembling the modern high five was at a grass-roots Olympic volleyball event sometime in the ‘70s. That routine was closer to a “high 10,” in which teammates simultaneously smacked both hands, shoulder high, patty-cake style.

Anyway, before that, high school basketball players had been executing an early form of the fist bump—one fellow’s balled-up hand tapping the top of another’s. And, before that, there was the display in which a lad offered an open palm, about waist high, and his colleague gave him a downward strike.

Before that was the widespread practice of patting a teammate on the rump. And, eventually, we arrived at such yahoo toasts as the flying chest bump and football’s counterintuitive bashing of teammates’ helmets. As if a little more skull-rattling were in order during a grid contest.

Given the concussion epidemic in modern sports, who’s to say that attaboy! gesture shouldn’t go the way of the coronavirus high five?